Throwing Cutter blades at the enemies. Ouch!

I added cutter beam attack. The mock-up of him tossing the cutter blade, so it had to happen in this game. You have to collect the cutter power up to use them. I added a counter that shows up when you have some. I didn't think it would be possible, but I realized that I had 12 sprites available and not 6. I was thinking 4 boss sprites took 4 sprite slot, but that not how it works. The enemy takes up 12 sprites, the boss when he appears takes 4. It could take more, but this isn't a mega cart game unfortunately. So the blade takes 1 slot. My concern adding this blade will add more load that it now have to compare itself with 6 other objects and a boss. It only checks when it is active. And I could go up to 10 objects maximum instead of 6, then again z80 chip have it limitation. Anyway, it have minor slowdown when it is on screen during the 1st boss, sorta on the 3rd one. At least the video update is done earlier, so no random numbers appearing on screen due to NMI occurring. The is pretty consistent with frame rate. It did have slowdown during the 4th boss fight when the game managed to get all 6 Rockies on screen at once.

The blade really made the game a lot easier. I'll probably have the easy mode to start off with 250 blades. I usually run out of them at level 4. I think easy-going players may like playing in this mode.

Now I need to script the final boss, make ending, finish level 5, add one more enemy, title screens, more sound effects, and my least favorite part is making music. I made 2, but I don't think it works. I need to get around making a music player to save on ROM space. Then I need to optimize to get memory available for music.

Then after all that, the instruction manual. I want it to be like Zelda instruction book. Controls, game information screen, power-up explanation, explanation of the levels like level 2 and 3 are locked by switches, and level 4 you have to hunt down 4 gold Rockies to open the boss door. Maybe a very vague map of the level since it is very open level with 5 floors and 25 rooms. Then lastly the enemies bestiary with the final boss with a shadow with a ?. Hopefully the final product will be enjoyable to everyone.

I do want to design a side scrolling RPG action game for Intellivision first.

I do want to design a game scrolling engine where the player can have 2 MOB, 1 projectile MOB, 1 HUD MOB, and 4 MOBs for multiplexing object exteeding 4 MOBs. Player MOB will be redefine so many animation frames can be used without using up all 64 GRAM cards. HUD mob will be uploaded from RAM. Object MOBs will be using the GRAM cards. I'll figure out how to multiplex them only when they exteed 4.

For a full screen scrolling game I'd use a MOB only to display vital information to the player e.g. energy. For Caverns (a Mars Minis game) I used 4 MOBs to display the distance travelled. Although that seems excessive, the distance travelled is all that counts in that game.

Another approach I took with Rocketeer was to display items as GRAM cards until the player picked them up. At that point I would replace it with a MOB. Adopting that approach might work well in your game to cut down on the flicker.